1500-1667 Contact & Conflict

In great detail he described sumptuous feasts of wild game and seafood, a "fat and lusty" soil, and forests of "high-timbered oaks" and other valuable trees.

By the mid 1600s English communities from Kittery to Sagadahoc were growing rapidly. This demographic growth, combined with the competition among fur-traders, put the Abenaki in the middle of a competitive war for land titles.

Europeans first arrived in the Gulf of Maine in a series of exploratory voyages lasting roughly from 1524 to 1613. During this century of exploration, three themes emerged with lasting significance for the history of Maine.

First, in almost every instance, initial relations between English and Indian deteriorated quickly from friendship to suspicion and hostility, suggesting a deep flaw in English diplomatic approaches.

Second, these early voyages projected a false and ultimately dangerous impression of Maine as a New-World paradise where little work would yield great wealth.

Third, they laid the basis for overlapping French and English claims to the Wabanaki homeland that precipitated a three-way struggle for supremacy or survival that lasted for another century. These themes – diplomatic failure, false expectations, and imperial claims – explain much about Maine's marginal status as a proprietary colony and later as a province of Massachusetts.

In 1497 Italian explorer John Cabot sailed to Nova Scotia under the British flag seeking a northern route to China. He may have reached Maine on his second voyage but was lost at sea off Newfoundland, and no record of his route survives.

Nevertheless, he established England's claim to the New World and took back stories of fabulous fishing on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, pointing the way for Basque, English, French, and Portuguese fishing ventures within a few years.

The first documented European visitor to Maine's coast was Florentine seafarer Giovanni da Verrazano, who in 1524, sailing for Francis I of France, made landfall off the Carolinas and sailed north to New England, where he heard tales of a fabled city of gold, silver, and crystal on the banks of the Penobscot River.

This heavily embroidered fantasy was inscribed on a 1529 map, making Norumbega –– and the coast of Maine –– a beacon for subsequent explorers. Verrazano's account praises the Algonquian people generally, but those he encountered in Maine were apparently less accommodating: "full of cruelty and vices, and ... so barbarous that we could never make any communication with them." His trip was important for putting Norumbega on the map and establishing a French counter-claim to the North Atlantic Coast.

In 1524-1525, Spain sent Estevan Gomez to northern New England, seeking a route to the orient. On the Maine coast he kidnapped 58 Indians and sold them into slavery. After this voyage European interest in New England dimmed for a time.

In 1604 Pierre Du Gua, Sieur de Monts, and French Royal Geographer Samuel de Champlain established a colony on a small island at the mouth of a river they named St. Croix, at Passamaquoddy Bay. Scurvy, severe cold, and shortages of fuel wood and fresh water caused terrible suffering, and in spring 1605 the survivors moved their post to Port-Royal on the southern tip of Nova Scotia.

On the Penobscot River they cemented a friendship with Abenaki sagamore Bessabez (or Bashaba). On the Kennebec they formed other alliances. Their stay, although brief, augmented France's claim to the region and gave the explorers a more realistic understanding of Maine's commercial prospects. There were no cities of gold, and as their encounter with Maine's winter demonstrated, colonizing would take more fortitude than one would expect for a territory in the same latitude as the Mediterranean.

In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold was sent to find a suitable place for a future colony. Gosnold established a small settlement in southern New England, sailed north into Maine, and returned to England with a cargo of furs and sassafras roots – thought to cure diseases like syphilis – and a record that cast New England as a colonizer's paradise.

In great detail, John Bereton, Gosnold's chronicler, exemplifies a shift in explorative narratives from confirming European fantasies to promoting New England's commercial possibilities. He described sumptuous feasts of wild game and seafood, a "fat and lusty" soil, and forests of "high-timbered oaks" and other valuable trees. His men "pestered" their ship with so many fish, they "threw numbers of them overboard againe." Gosnold first called his summer home "Shole (Shoal) Hope" then tried an even more optimistic name: Cape Cod.

Sensing even greater profits, merchants from Bristol outfitted two vessels under Martin Pring and sent him to Casco Bay in 1603. In Southern New England, while Pring exchanged gifts and initially established friendly relations with Indians, he almost immediately allowed his men to attack the Indians with two large dogs.

"And when we would be rid of the Savages company," Pring noted, "wee would let loose the Mastives, and suddenly with outcryes they would flee away." Having left a legacy of ill will, Pring loaded a cargo of sassafras and left for England, enthusiastic about the prospects for colonizing and about the "gaine to us" of furs and other items.

George Waymouth, third in this series of English voyagers, made landfall near the St. George River, a land rich in "Firre, Birch, Oke, and Beach." He remarked on the abundance of the land and the ocean. He kidnapped five Indians from Pemaquid and took them back to England.

After talking with Waymouth's captives, Popham and Gorges, among others, urged the king and Parliament in 1606 to issue a new royal charter. This went to the Virginia Company that gained rights to the coast between the Spanish Main and New France. The Virgina Company accorded London merchants the southern section and Plymouth merchants the territory between the Chesapeake and Bay of Fundy.

Exhibits

In the late summer of 1607, a group of English colonists sailed to the mouth of the Kennebec River in hopes of starting a settlement. The effort lasted about a year and resulted in building about 18 structures and a ship.

Indians and Europeans engaged in trade from the earliest days of contact. Furs were an important trade commodity, one which both provided Indians with desired goods and altered their way of life. The fur trade was relatively short-lived.